In an extended conversation, recorded in this podcast, I got a chance to ask Horace about whether Apple fits in traditional "disruption theory" as discussed by Horace's old instructor Clay Christensen.

We are constantly bombarded in the media by articles announcing that some new competitor's product is an "iPhone killer." Why do so many of us instinctively want to click on a post with that kind of headline?

Christensen himself has predicted that Apple was going to face its Waterloo many times in the past and it famously hasn't (to this point). I ask him about why that is and what processes, people and resources have allowed Apple to avoid this ignominious fate thus far.

We then get into a deeper discussion about specifically when Apple will get disrupted by a competitor with some alternative to the iPhone. (In short, Horace thinks we are still years away from that happening because Apple has done such a good job of opening itself up to third parties' apps that run on its platform.)

We discuss how Apple has never panicked when its critics said that its Maps was terrible and that it didn't have a larger screen to compete with Samsung.

Later in the discussion, we turn to a discussion of how investors should think about valuing various different kinds of tech companies: ad-supported ones like Facebook and
Google, vs. e-commerce ones like
Alibaba and Amazon, vs. product ones like Apple. Both Horace and I have been recently played around recently with the metric market capitalization per Monthly Active User (MAU). We discuss what these numbers point to in terms of how different companies are valued in the market and whether those are too high or too low, as an alternative metric to the traditional price-to-earnings ratio.

The results suggest that ad-supported businesses are valued far less than companies that sell stuff. We discuss the implications of this for corporate strategy of such companies as Snapchat, Facebook,
Twitter, and Google.